The COVID-19 pandemic made homelessness in Toronto more visible, due to the rise of encampments in public parks.
However, homelessness in Canada had been an issue of widespread concern long before the pandemic's arrival.
A 2016 report found that at least 235,000 Canadians experience homelessness in a year, and 35,000 Canadians experience it on a given night.
A Nanos survey found in 2020 that 72% of Canadians believed it was urgent to work toward ending homelessness in Canada.
A 2020 report from the Wellesley Institute argues that there were disproportionately higher rates of evictions in Black neighborhoods, and that Black residents were among the worst hit by COVID-19.
As part of its stay at home order in March 2020, the Ontario government instated a ban on evictions, however this was lifted with the emergency order in June 2020.
The Ontario government however made evictions easier, according to some critics, due to its passage of Bill 184 which allowed landlords to bypass the Landlord and Tenant Board.
One advocacy group deemed the cascading effects of Bill 184 'a bloodbath of evictions'.
By December 2020, Toronto tenants were calling for a reinstatement of the moratorium on evictions.
The crisis conditions of the pandemic lead to an increase in organizing against what many homelessness advocates deemed to be social murder of the city's unhoused.
This ranged from legal lawsuits against the city's shelter system to calls for a city plan that would address the large numbers of unhoused people camping outside, to suits against encampment evictions, to large scale protests against the clearings of public parks.
The Covid-19 encampments are best understood as emerging out of a external text>longer history of urban informality in Toronto.
